LOST SPANISH MISSION
The Santa Cruz de San Sabá Mission, built in 1757, is the only Spanish mission in Texas destroyed by Native Americans. The destruction was so complete that it took 235 years for archeologists to finally confirm the site on the banks of the San Sabá River about 120 miles northwest of San Antonio. Franciscan padres […]
A Texas Frontier Woman
Elizabeth Ann Carter Sprague FitzPatrick Clifton knew tragedy long before October 13, 1864, when 700 Kiowa and Comanche warriors tore through Young County in what became known as the Elm Creek Raid. At the age of sixteen in 1842, Elizabeth married a free black man in Alabama. She moved with his family to Texas where […]
Texas Retrieves A 16th Century Treasure
Three Spanish galleons, caught in a storm in the Gulf of Mexico, wrecked on the sandbars just off Padre Island on April 29, 1554. Ironically, as the flotilla sailed from Veracruz, a Dominican missionary on his way for an audience with the Pope, shared his sinister forebodings: “Woe be to those who are going to […]
Memories of a Pioneer Woman
Thanks to the stories that Elizabeth Owens told her daughters, we know about life in South Texas during some of its most turbulent times Elizabeth was two years old in 1829 when her stepfather, James Quinn, moved the family from New Jersey to Texas as part of McGloin-McMullen’s Irish Colony. While the group of fifty-three […]
Sorting Truth from Legend
When an old story comes from many sources, it is difficult to glean the exact details. In this case, we know a man was scalped and lived to tell about it Farmers like Josiah Wilbarger and his wife who settled the west accepted the ever-present danger of Indians hostile to white encroachment into their homelands. […]
Tales of Fort Leaton
The Chihuahuan Desert hugging the Rio Grande in far West Texas was a killing field for Spanish explorers, Apaches, Comanches, white scalp hunters, and freighters daring to travel between San Antonio and Ciudad Chihuahua. Apache and Comanche raids into Mexico—killing hundreds, stealing thousands of livestock, and capturing women and children—resulted by 1835 in the Mexican […]
The Mystery of Millie Durkin
She was eighteen months old on October 13, 1864, when a Kiowa warrior entered a blazing ranch house and found Millie Durkin crawling out from under a bed after the raiding party had killed her mother and baby brother. Over the next eighteen years Millie’s grandmother, Elizabeth Carter Clifton led a determined search for the […]
He Came to Texas Seeking Revenge
It’s hard to know what’s truth and what’s myth about the adventures of William Alexander Anderson Wallace. He was a nineteen-year-old working in his father’s Virginia fruit orchard in 1835 when he heard that his brother and a cousin had been killed in the Goliad Massacre during the Texas War for Independence from Mexico. That […]
From Indian Captive to Texas Leader
Rebecca Jane Gilleland was seven when Comanches swooped down on her family, killed both parents, and took as captives Rebecca and her six-year-old brother William. Born in Philadelphia in 1831, Rebecca settled with her family near present Refugio about 1837. When Rebecca recounted her experiences to the Galveston Daily News in 1913, she said it […]
Indianola: Gateway to the Southwest
Waves lap the sunbaked shell beach of a ghost town that never should have been. Despite its locale at near sea level, people built the thriving seaport of Indianola that rivaled Galveston as a major shipping point on the Texas coast. Its shore became the landing site for thousands of Germans escaping poverty in the […]